Khyra Ishaq, aged just seven years old, was emaciated and confined to a squalid room, she was deprived of food and regularly beaten, dying in excruciating pain in May 2008, weighing 2st 9lb.

She was found to have suffered more than 60 injuries. Khyra and five other children in the family home shared a single mattress and one small bowl of food a day, in conditions which were compared to a “Victorian workhouse”.

According to the Times newspaper, Children’s services at Birmingham City Council were last year described as “unfit for purpose” after it emerged that 16 children known to social workers, including Khyra, had died of abuse or neglect in five years.

The department mounted a vigorous defence of its role in the child’s death, saying that it lacked sufficient powers to intervene, especially once Khyra was removed from school to be “home-educated”.

I have this to say, very briefly at present, about my own experiences of Social Services.

My Partner had become seriously mentally ill with a diagnosis of Schizophrenia after our son was born eleven years ago.
It took a gigantic effort on my part to get any medical help at all from the NHS, and, when it at last appeared, it was pathetic and utterly inadequate.

When my partner ‘abducted’ my one year old son and her own young ten year old daughter and nine year old son from our house in North London in a drunken frenzy of psychotic schizophrenia breakdown at one a.m. one night, she nearly killed them all.

She drove 200 miles from London to North Wales, tired, drunk, raving, and completely psychotic. She frequently fell asleep at the wheel of the car, and her terrified nine and ten year olds desperately tried to keep her awake as she swerved from side to side of the motorway.

It was a following lorry driver who saved their lives at one point as the women was completely asleep at the wheel and the kids could no longer keep her awake.

Fortunately they all survived that ride of terror to end up staying in the one bedroomed pensioners sheltered accommodation belonging to my schizophrenic’s mother, also another schizophrenic.

So, two kids forcibly removed from their schools and and a one year old baby, together with two schizophrenic women in a tiny one bedroomed flat in the wilds of North Wales, several miles from the nearest village or town. That’s five people in that tiny, foetid, festering prison with two completely insane people, quite unable to properly look after them. Because that was what it was to those children; a prison full of madness.

My desperate efforts over the next few weeks to get North Wales Social Services to help both my very ill partner and all three children before some dreadful accident happened fell on completely deaf ears. At first social services simply refused to bother to do anything at all, saying it ‘was nothing to do with me’.

This was despite the mother already having spent a long time being forcibly detained against her will for her own safety and the safety of others – sectioned – in a secure ward of a mental hospital.

Eventually, my constant telephoning of these incompetent fools of social workers forced them to do at least something, because I was being such a nuisance to them and obviously would not just go away. But their plan was just to tick a few boxes so they could just end up really doing nothing at all except get rid of me.

Cutting a long story short, Social Services had a legal obligation to follow up my report of children being endangered. They also a legal responsibility to provide medical treatment to a vulnerable person, the schizophrenic.

So, they did eventually, and with very bad grace, pay my partner and children a visit, apparently taking a great interest in examining the feet and toes of the one year old for some bizarre reason. They left and then did nothing at all.

These incompetent social services fools couldn’t even be bothered to contact me and inform me of the outcome of their visit. So, of course, I only found out about the visit by accident when I telephoned them.

After the usual battle with the idiots trying not to speak to me on the grounds it was private information and nothing to do with me as I wasn’t the woman’s husband, they finally did tell me they had paid a visit.

They said ‘We paid a visit to your partner and children, and we agree she is obviously very mentally ill, but there is nothing we can do until something actually happens’.

In other words, the social services person speaking to me spelt out the fact the children had to be visibly and seriously physically injured before these social services morons would do anything at all.

It didn’t seem to even occur to the social services dimwits that the children were already suffering immense emotional and mental strains in a hothouse of pure psychosis with two, off the wall, completely mad women behaving in very bizarre ways and dangerously unable to look after young children, or even themselves.

That was just the beginning of my Social Services nightmare.

Susan Dicks, North Wales Director of Children’s Services then entered my life with an astonishing malevolence and vicious incompetence that simply takes your breath away. In my opinion and certainly my own experience, she was the sort of typical, spiteful minded, senior management Social Services harridan like Sharon Shoesmith of Haringey Social services – the unpleasant and lazy Social Services person who presided over the death of Baby Peter.

Curiously Haringey Social Services were going to come into this saga shortly as well, more of which later.

Meanwhile, I can assure you readers that I have extensive experiences now of social services which show me they are, as a whole, staffed from top to bottom with utterly incompetent, mean minded, ignorant fools whose main achievement in life is to completely destroy children’s lives in one way or another. As well as destroy the lives of innocent and decent parents, condemning thousands of children to lives of deprivation and misery of one sort or another.

The entire collective body of UK Social Services is a dangerous, vicious menace – a product of a dangerous, controlling government.

Below is an exchange of emails between me and my eleven year old son’s history teacher which have suddenly made me realise how truly ghastly State education is in secondary schools, and how I must do something to get my son away from this appalling and useless State education system which is obviously already wrecking my son’s real keenness to learn.

He is an obviously bright person who could do well with decent teaching, but equally obviously, it looks as though he will be badly let down by useless teachers in a useless educational system orchestrated by a dangerously useless doctrinaire Labour Government engaged in fourteen years of social engineering and manipulation to impoverise the entire population intellectually as well as financially.(more…)

You appear to be slightly incredulous as if this is your first experience of astonishingly corrupt bureaucracy as you describe in Tax Hell ! Surely that cannot be the case if you are a journo ?

I fell from what passes for semi-wealthy middle class grace due to a combination of various odd circumstances which have left me currently a penniless peasant, single parent, fighting off endless absolutely astounding State sponsored garbage of the type you describe in Tax Hell.

– Customs and Excise arbitrarily bankrupt me about 1999 on the basis of imaginary estimates of unpaid VAT, despite the fact I made many telephone calls to them telling them I was no longer trading and owed no tax. Although they responded to these telephone calls with bits of paper showing evidence I had told them I wasn’t trading, they just carried on estimating and bankrupting anyway. I suppose they must have just done it because they were bored and needed something to do to just keep them busy really.

Because of a slightly dramatic medical emergency experienced by the mother of my son on the day of the bankruptcy hearing, I failed to make it to court as planned. If I had gone to court, there simply couldn’t have been a bankruptcy, but it happened by default – of course.

I got to court a few weeks later, when Customs told the judge that, no, I didn’t actually owe, and never had actually owed, any of the fantasy money dreamed up by the VAT man at all. In fact he said there had been a meeting with me at some point prior to any court proceedings where I had settled the last valid VAT bill and had a friendly face to face discussion about how I was no longer trading while I actually handed over all the cash that I owed to close my account completely.

But the VAT man seemed a bit petulant about me not being very compliant with ‘procedure’ and form filling – useless bureaucracy and making up non-existent rules as go by the Vat man to you and me !

The problem was, the VAT man said, was Customs and Excise had no option but on carry on making imaginary estimates of tax I should be paying each month on the basis of what had been paid in the past when I was trading even though they knew perfectly well I had told them many times I had ceased trading.

Why was this ? Well, it was just that I hadn’t filled out the right form, apparently ! So, they knew perfectly well I owed no tax because I wasn’t trading, but they just deliberately carried on letting their computer automatically making imaginary demands which were never going to be paid. Then, when these demands went unpaid for a few months, they ‘automatically’ commenced bankruptcy proceedings knowing full well the whole idea was a complete fiction.

It didn’t seem to matter that it would cost the taxpayers a fortune in wasted money and wreck the life of the person they were pointlessly persecuting – simply because the right form hadn’t been filled in ! (more…)

A&E consultant turns to me and asks me if I agree with his diagnosis of Manic Depression.

I’d already worked it out ages ago. Yes, I said; that’s what I think it is, aint I clever cos I’m not a doctor.

She spends time in hospital and is put on medication. Cutting a long story short, the NHS treatment for mental health patients is a complete shambles and she is treated appallingly.

One evening she suddenly becomes wildly psychotic, has a funny turn and flees the house in London with her two kids aged 9 &10 plus our one year old, three kids in total.

She drives 200 miles to North Wales at 1 a.m. drunk and clinically psychotic, falling asleep at the wheel on the five hour journey and constantly woken up by her two terrified children. All nearly killed & only saved by following lorry driver as they swerve around motorway.

I contact social services asking them to help. the kids are at risk etc.

Social services do their best to avoid doing anything, but eventually, after a lot of nagging by me in many phone calls they pay mum and kids a visit in North Wales but can’t be bothered to let me know.

I only find out with one of my nagging phone calls when the social services brightly announce they have now actually seen mum & kids and they agree she is barking mad and psychotic, but social services tell me they can’t do anything about removing the three kids for their own safety ‘until something happens’ as they so eloquently described the kids being harmed in some way.

So, I apply to court for custody. Kids mum actually agrees with me and says so in court to judge who then orders interim custody to me but orders father of other two kids to take them (when he didn’t want to !) It became a disaster.

Mum returns to my house with me and baby.

Social services then tell mother to get a lawyer to ‘ fight me for custody, otherwise she may never see her son again’. That was what that moron social worker Conrad Barzey said to her a week after she had come out of hospital after being badly ill and sectioned. Mum, the idiot Barzey and me, all sitting around a table at my house where mum was very happily living with me.

This incompetent fool Barzey causes mum to have another breakdown within a few days and a week later she abducts boy to North Wales 200 miles away.

I show police my court order instructing the boy should live with me at my house and both police and me think it will be quite straightforward to retrieve boy as their whereabouts are known.

But North Wales Social Services then tell police to get lost and instruct them to tell me to go to court if I want to retrieve my son.

I go to court to be faced by a posse of social workers with a legal team, including a barrister, all now telling mum how they will champion her in fighting me for custody – despite the fact mum had started out telling me and announcing in court she wanted me to have custody as she recognised the dangers of her mental illness. She wanted me to have custody she told me, because she completely trusted me and our relationship was and had always been good excepting when the illness kicked in.

Social workers tell family court judge that they recommend mother has custody on grounds that as our son had been with mum for these past few weeks ‘it would be disruptive’ for him to be returned to me. This despite the fact I had been the primary carer for some long time.

Family Court Judge tells social workers she is not happy with mum looking after child as she has recent history of severe mental illness. Judge is forced to accept social workers recommendation but tells social workers to visit mum and child daily. Judge tells me I am a good father and social services must pay my expenses to travel and spend two days a week with my son.

In order for the social workers to fulfill orders of Judge I am forced with legal blackmailing to agree to consenting to a voluntary ‘care order’ to effectively place my son in social services care so they may spend money on fulfilling judges various orders.

I had absolutely no idea of the dangers of volunteering my son into the care of social services just so they could have their way with their obsession that I, simply by virtue of being a male, would be naturally entirely unsuitable in some unspoken, undefined way, to properly look after my own son.

Now that I am older and wiser, I realise it was a complete stitch-up by my very bad legal team (I was on ‘legal aid’ so the solicitors think they could do a lousy job) and social services.

Social services now had the legal control of my son, I had none at all – and they proceeded to abuse it, preventing me having access to him and even threatening me with having him adopted ‘if I didn’t co-operative with them.

Mum soon showed just how incapable she was of looking after the boy but social services did not remove him for many months.

When they did remove him, they put him into a foster home where he was physically abused and by the time I managed to rescue my son from the evil clutches of social services fostering a few weeks later he was covered in 28 identical round bruises on his torso where he had been repeated poked in the ribs with a walking stick by these appalling, sadistic and thoroughly nasty social services foster parents.

This rib poking with a stick was to prevent the boy coming too close to them. The foster parents wanted him to keep away from them because he wanted to be constantly ‘cuddled’ being used to much affection from mum and me as well as his older siblings. The stick was poked in his ribs to keep him at a distance.

How do I know ? My boy was three when I finally retrieved him and could speak extremely well indeed. He told me and I recorded it on tape. He still remembers it at the age of eleven ! It hurt – a lot !

Mum returned to live me with at some point, but social services actually did their best to prevent that for some unknown reason. Unfortunately mum’s illness just became worse and worse as a direct result of the chaos social services had caused.

Social services had presided over the disappearance of the two elder children to a father who didn’t want them anyway and proceeded to completely traumatise them until they could eventually escape back to mum some time later.

By this time the obvious stresses on mum incurred by all these proceedings just made her illness worse and worse and, cutting a long story short, she simply drifted away from her son and me under constant pressure from social services and the North Wales council who would harass her from time to time over her council house.

The North Wales Council and their social services department involved in this saga were positively depraved, certainly quite corrupt, certainly liars. Typical Tony Bliar/Gormless Gordon Labour Government aparachik employees, busily destroying the fabric of our country.

They are also mostly definitely wasters of vast amounts of public money (the reason all our taxes are sky high as the same scenario is repeated throughout this wicked government headed by Gormless Gordon, preceded by Tony Bliar the warmongering intellectual spastic with the hugely inflated ego).

The many details of this story only continue to make it more nightmarish than you can possibly imagine, but I have already written nearly fourteen hundred words in this synopsis. It would take a book to tell the whole story.

Haringey’s Sharon Shoesmith is much in the news today for being an incompetent fool when she was the Director in Charge of Haringey’s Social Services department. You know, that bunch of bureaucratic idiots who keep presiding over the repeated murders of small, defenceless children who are supposed to be in Haringey’s care.

Vacuous Sharon seems completely unaware of just how incompetent Haringey Social Services were when she was Director in charge of what they did before she was fired – in case even more child murders took place.

She seems to think Haringey and her bunch of useless Social Services layabouts weren’t to blame for the death of Victoria Climbie or little Baby Peter Connelly who was deliberately and systematically tortured by the sadistic boyfriend of his disgustingly depraved mother Tracy Connelly.

Baby Peter was finally killed by having his back deliberately broken by the sadistic boyfriend with the apparent tacit approval of Haringey Social Services headed by Sharon Shoesmith.

I can personally confirm just how incompetent and stupid Haringey Council’s Social Services Department has been. Why ? Because I am the parent of a child whose life Haringey did their best to wreck.

Neither the child’s mother or me, his father, was ever thought or accused by anyone of being bad or inadequate parents. That wasn’t the problem at all.

It was from a completely different direction that Haringey Social Services entered our lives and terminally damaged the family, directly causing my child to effectively end up losing his mother. That’s right. Haringey caused my child to be deprived of his mother through sheer ignorance, incompetence, and pig headed stupidity with a bit of blatant and provable lying from social workers to deliberately falsify a report to the family court.

Haringey’s nasty and incompetent behaviour also left me as a single parent to bring this child up without his mother – basically because social workers’ behaviour and Conrad Barzey’s in particular made her have a nervous breakdown; driving her into a state of mental illness which became so severe she has been incarcerated in secure mental hospitals on a regular basis ever since and is incapable of looking after herself or her child.

Oh, and I also lost my £800 000 house and any possibility of working for a living for years and am now left trying to survive as a single parent looking after my child with State benefits of just over one hundred pounds a week. Try it yourself, it’s impossible. It’s real grinding poverty. Child poverty, never mind me. It’s child poverty deliberately engineered by this filthy, mendacious government’s, lazy, malicious, incompetent employees.

I remember in particular a nasty pair of Haringey Social workers who visited my house. One of them was this ignorant, ill educated and unintelligent oaf called Conrad Barzey. He put his signature to some very provable lies and falsified a report to the Family Court and generally did his best to deliberately construct the report in a way which would ensure a bias of some kind towards deliberately building up an entirely imaginary case to persuade the Family Court this child should not be looked after by its father – me.

As I was the only person available to look after the child, it seemed Haringey were quite happy to make sure the child lost both his parents for absolutely no valid reason whatever. Indeed, I was actually threatened by social workers – right in front of my solicitor – that social services were now ‘considering adoption’ and would have this child forcibly adopted ‘if I didn’t co-operate with them’.

So, let’s just get this right shall we ? Social services would forcibly adopt a child because they didn’t like its argumentative parent being indignant at being bullied and completely interfered with by social services; who had already illegally taken the child into care under false pretences, aided by a bit of lying in court, and now they wanted to teach that parent a lesson in the power this notorious State wields over its cringing citizenry by wrenching this parent’s child away into the netherworld of the abysmally failing care system.

No doubt where the child would grow up like all the other children in care being physically, sexually and emotionally abused to mature into an ill educated drug taking, criminally inclined psychological train wreck, costing the rest of society a fortune as this individual, wrecked by the evils of social services, ekes out its miserable, deprived existence at huge cost to everyone.

But, if the parent was passive and grovelled sufficiently at the mentally challenged idiots who comprised social services, then their egos would still be intact enough to graciously allow the parent to have his own child back as a reward for being compliant – even perhaps when that parent was totally unable to safely look after a child as demonstrated by the Victoria Climbie murder and the sadistic murder of Baby Peter Connelly by his evil carers.

In other words, it was clearly more important for social services to have their egos massaged and to feel good about themselves arbitrarily wielding misplaced power over other people who they should be having absolutely nothing to do with in the first place, than to make rational assessments about taking vulnerable children away from murdering and abusive parents. Golly Gosh ! Perish the thought !

It was like having a conversation with the Mafia; and they were using the language and threatening aggressive violence of the Mafia to intimidate me – just because they had the power to. So they abused that power; just like they abused it to let child after child like baby Peter Connelly be murdered in Haringey while they were supposed to be protecting those very same children.

It wasn’t exactly clear to me at the time what on earth it could mean as I was most certainly ‘co-operating with them’ in the most civil, patient, and friendly way I knew how because they had already made it clear to me they would do anything they pleased to just arbitrarily take my child away from his mother and father without the slightest justification.

But then there had been the incident of ‘the pointing finger’ when I had unthinkingly actually pointed my index finger at a social worker from the armchair I was sitting in as an unconscious bit of everyday common or garden body language to simply illustrate a point I was making at the time.

I hadn’t realised what an offensively brutal crime pointing a finger to illustrate something was in the warped world of idiot social workers. Apparently, it meant I was being violent they said. Curiously, their overdeveloped sense of umbrage and concern over possible insults to themselves never extended to being able to recognise real violence leading to the murders of children like Baby Peter Connelly !

They had made it plain to me that they had every intention of making sure that they would do everything they could to prevent me from having my own child and they would rather the child be (completely illegally) deprived of both parents for no reason whatever.

I’ll tell you more about him later as it is well after midnight and I can’t do justice to writing this ENTIRELY TRUE story properly because I’m so tired and I’m already rambling a bit.

I know apples normally store well wrapped in paper, but mine are not yet ripe and loads of nearly ripe apples are getting mouldy spots that drill right into the apple until it gets so ill it just drops off the tree. These are so nearly ripe that they are worth preserving after cutting off the mouldy bits.

Also, very annoyingly, my huge apple crop is rapidly diminishing to nothing as all those mouldy apples fall off the tree and I’m being left with very few left on the trees to ripen fully. I think it is the weather conditions encouraging mould. Spuds and tomatoes are already completely wrecked with it.

I have no freezer space. My thirty year old chest freezer had a tantrum when I gave it it’s once in two years clean and it stopped working. My daughter then gave me a newish little under the counter freezer from her old micro flat with it’s extra micro kitchen that was so small it made boiling an egg a challenge.

In my then research into the possibilities of buying a new chest freezer I discovered just how expensive ancient freezers are because they gobble electricity voraciously. I had already noticed mine was not only on all the time, but huge chunks of ice formed on the outside wall at the bottom as well as creeping out of the top and preventing the lid from being closed. It was obviously trying it’s best to heat up the entire planet at my expense.

Although the precious little thing recovered from it’s tantrum when the electric motor eventually dried out and it started working again, it was too late. There was no way I was going to pay about £400 a year in electricity to keep it going when all the modern freezers talk about annual costs of about £25. Anyway, I am so short of money I can’t afford even the most basic electricity bill at present. So, no silly extravagances like ancient power guzzling, manic, hyperactive freezers then.

And, when you have an income which is so low it is impossible to make ends meet anyway, you soon learn a simple rule of basic economics which is, if you can survive without it now, then don’t spend money buying it – whatever it is ! As I already have a very small freezer I cannot justify even thinking of spending anything at all on a larger one unless it pays for itself – which it wont.

I would have frozen all this fruit as I have done in the past, but I thought bottling it was an alternative and it might also preserve taste and texture better too as freezers destroy food over time. They are not what they are cracked up to be ! It also occurred to me that when things are frozen there is a constant ongoing cost of paying for electricity to keep them frozen, but once you have finished the bottling process, there is no further cost at all. Something to bear in mind !

Nobody has really told me the answer to my question. Can you just chuck boiled stuff in sterilised jars just like you do jam. The answer seems to be no. So I did it anyway and wait to see how long it lasts. I don’t suppose botulism will be a problem as it is more likely the fruit might ferment instead. We’ll see.

I have loads of Kilner jars as I used to make tons of jam once. In my efforts to make sure they were completely sterilised I made them too hot (something to do with having a lousy permanently overheating oven with almost no temperature control). So when I started plonking boiling fruit into two very large and expensive ones they just shattered . Aaaaaarrrrgh ! Usually that only happens when people don’t heat them up and just put hot stuff into cold glass jars. But I think my Kilner jars were so hot the glass was almost melting as I poured the boiling fruit in.

I don’t have time at the moment to make jams and chutneys etc, so will just try bottling stuff properly now and stop trying shortcuts as it has all been more hassle than just sticking to the idea of cramming the stuff into bottles and leaving them in the oven to sterilise.